So far all the songs you've heard have been written by Matt, sung by Matt, even my bass lines written by Matt; it is as we've established kind of Matt's band; and yet maybe in the background, over some slightly misplaced bass notes you can hear my backing vocals drifting in, usually towards the end of the song, when it seemed ok for me to do so.
People often said that I was a better singer than Matt, but I always thought he had a more interesting vocal that suited the style of the songs. The sound of illinois.
It is about this time that we settled on the name illinois, I seem to remember we'd been watching US election coverage on TV, and both commented on how great sounding American state names were. We imagined that in the new sounds section of the NME the headline would be "Come on, feel the illi-noise" but as housemate Dave pointed out "illinois - will annoy !" was just as likely.
"Sundays" the song is different, always introduced mid-set as 'Marc's song' and broke things up a bit sound-wise, it was actually a joint songwriting effort between the two of us, and as we were following the rules of The Beatles and I wrote most of the words, I therefore had to sing it.
It is different and not as good as the other songs and unfortunately on this recording it doesn't back up any claims about me being a better singer as I sound terrible, if you thought I couldn't play the bass, well I certainly can't sing and play the bass.
Several times on stage I sang this with a strong mid-american accent, a man once asked me after a gig if I was actually from Illinois.
To complicate the drumming issue, Matt returned from a trip to see Paul Weller to announce that we'd optimistically got a gig in Nottingham, upstairs at The Yorker pub supporting his friends band 'The Headbirths' on 23rd of August, but hey that was a month away, that would surely be plenty enough time to learn to play the bass and find a drummer ?